Main Inclusion Report for gnome-orca

Background

Orca is maintained by an active team at Sun Microsystems. It has been selected by the Gnome project as a replacement for gnopernicus in Gnome 2.16.

Requirements

1. Availability: in universe: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-orca, builds on all architectures

2. Rationale:

   • We need a screen reader. This one is better than gnopernicus and will replace it in Gnome.

3. Security:

   • No CVE entries.

   • No Secunia history.

   • No binaries running as root or suid/sgid.

   • Orca listens on port 20433 as an http server to take speech input from other applications like FireVox and for it's own health check (see below).

4. Quality assurance:

   • Active upstream.

   • When Orca is run for the first time it asks 4-5 questions (in both text and voice) which are answered with y/n, which completes the setup. This is an improvement on Gnopernicus which only has a GUI-based setup (a catch 22 for blind people).
   • Stability is very important in this kind of application because if any part of the stack goes down the user loses the ability to interact with the computer. Orca includes a small deamon that checks that all is well and restarts orca and gnome-speech if required.

   • Bugs: It's a fairly new package under active development so there will be some bugs, but these a quickly dealt with by the active team. The new features make up for the lack of maturity. See bug list.

   • Hardware: Orca sends raw text to either gnome-speech (in main) or speech-dispatcher (universe). These in turn output to the audio hardware or braille display.

5. Dependencies:

   • All in Main

6. Recommends:

   • brltty (in main)

Reviewers

MartinPitt: approved